Maria Altmann, Pursuer of Family’s Stolen Paintings, Dies at 94

Maria V. Altmann, a Jewish refugee who in her 80s waged a successful legal battle all the way to the United States Supreme Court to force the Austrian government to return paintings by Gustav Klimt that had been seized from her family by the Nazis, died on Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.

Her death was confirmed by her son Charles.

For more than half a century, five paintings once owned by Ms. Altmann’s uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer — two portraits of his wife, Adele, and three landscapes — had hung in Austrian museums, most recently the Austrian Gallery in Vienna.

All had been seized, along with a large porcelain collection and a sugar refinery, after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. After the war, the Austrian government kept the paintings, on the grounds that Adele, who died in 1925, required in her will that Ferdinand donate the paintings to the state museum after his death, which took place in 1945.

In so doing, it disregarded the fact that his will had left his estate to his nieces and nephews, including Ms. Altmann, and ignored Adele’s less than emphatic language: “I kindly ask my husband.”

The most celebrated of the paintings, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” was a commissioned work painted in 1907. It shows a sloe-eyed, elegantly coiffed beauty seated against a gold background in a resplendent gold dress. In a second portrait, painted in pastel tones five years later, Adele stands facing forward, wearing an enormous broad-brimmed hat and a close-fitting white dress.

In 1998, Ms. Altmann became aware of documents in the Austrian government archives uncovered by Hubertus Czernin, a journalist, who had helped reveal the Nazi background of Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary general of the United Nations. Mr. Czernin had also, in a series of exposés, described the nefarious practice under which the Austrian government returned certain looted artworks only if the owners agreed to sign away their rights to other seized art.

Under pressure to re-examine its Nazi past, the government passed a law in 1998 nullifying such agreements, and the ministry of culture opened its archives to researchers for the first time. Mr. Czernin, examining records at the Austrian Gallery, concluded that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had not donated the Klimt paintings to the museum.

“I had never even thought of taking the paintings away,” Ms. Altmann told The Daily Telegraph of London in 2007. “I was under the impression that they were theirs.”

She hired a lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, a friend and the grandson of two Viennese composers, Arnold Schoenberg and Eric Zeisl. Together, the two pursued what most legal experts regarded as a long-shot case.

They filed a claim with a panel commissioned by the Culture Ministry, which in 1999 returned 16 Klimt drawings of Adele Bloch-Bauer and 19 sets of porcelain, but none of the Klimt paintings.

In 2000, balking at the exorbitant expense of pursuing the case in Austria, where costs are calibrated according to the value of the assets at issue, they successfully filed suit in California against the Austrian government, which appealed the ruling.

Ms. Altmann and Mr. Schoeberg won appeals all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2004 that Ms. Altmann had the right to pursue her claim under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, even though the act had not been passed until 1976.

Mr. Schoenberg, taking a calculated risk, then submitted the case to binding arbitration in Austria and convinced a three-judge panel that the wording of Adele’s will was a request, not a command. In January 2006 the panel awarded Ms. Altmann ownership of the five paintings.

With money provided by the businessman and philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder, the Neue Galerie in Manhattan bought the earlier portrait of Adele for $135 million. At the time, it was the largest sum ever paid for a painting. The four other paintings were auctioned by Christie’s for $192.7 million and went into private collections.

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“I’m a person of great perseverance,” Ms. Altmann told The New York Times in 2006, when the Klimts arrived in Los Angeles for an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Nevertheless, she added, “I could not imagine that these paintings would ever really come my way in a peaceful solution.”

Maria Viktoria Bloch-Bauer was born on Feb. 18, 1916, in Vienna. The family was wealthy and her father, Gustav, while trained as a lawyer, preferred to live as an aesthete, advising his brother Ferdinand on artistic matters.

As the Nazi threat gathered force, the family scrambled to protect its assets. Ferdinand, whose refinery outside Vienna supplied a fifth of Austria’s sugar, set up a trust account with a Swiss bank just days before the Nazi takeover.

Photo

Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” was one of five paintings awarded to Ms. Altmann by Austrian judges in 2006. The Neue Galerie in Manhattan later bought it for $135 million.Credit
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, via Getty Images

It was violated almost immediately, and the business was sold for a fraction of its value to an Austrian businessman with Nazi connections. In 2005, a federal judge in Brooklyn awarded $21 million to Ms. Altmann and descendants of another family with interests in the refinery.

The award was by far the largest to date from a fund of $1.25 billion paid by Swiss banks in 1998 to settle a class-action suit brought by Jewish depositors, who had accused the banks of betraying their trust in order to curry favor with the Nazis.

Ferdinand’s palatial summer home near Prague was occupied by Reinhard Heydrich, a principal architect of the Final Solution, and its art treasures, including the Klimts, were dispersed by Ferdinand’s court-imposed lawyer, the astoundingly named Erich Führer, a Nazi when the party was still illegal in Austria.

Ms. Altmann’s husband, Fritz Altmann, an opera singer whom she married in 1937, was sent to Dachau to pressure his brother, the owner of a cashmere business, to relinquish his overseas assets. After Fritz was released, the couple lived under house arrest. One day, Ms. Altmann gave her guards the slip by claiming that her husband needed to see the dentist. The two boarded a plane to Cologne and made their way to the Dutch border, where, on a moonless night, a peasant guided them across a brook, under barbed wire and into Holland.

They reached the United States in 1940 and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where Mr. Altmann, who died in 1994, worked at a Lockheed plant. Ms. Altmann began selling cashmere sweaters and socks sent by her brother-in-law, who had set up a business in New York.

She did so well that she and her husband went into the clothing business. For years she sold the company’s samples from a small shop in Beverly Hills. She later ran a boutique from her home.

In addition to her son Charles, of Los Angeles, she is survived by two other sons, Peter, of Puget Sound, Wash., and Jim, of Agoura Hills, Calif.; a daughter, Margie Crain of Solana Beach, Calif.; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Ms. Altmann fought the Austrian government with great zest. “They will delay, delay, delay, hoping I will die,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2001, with no end in sight to her case. “But I will do them the pleasure of staying alive.”

She did. And victory was sweet. After the paintings arrived in the United States, she told The New York Times: “You know, in Austria they asked, ‘Would you loan them to us again?’ And I said: ‘We loaned them for 68 years. Enough loans.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on February 9, 2011, on Page B19 of the New York edition with the headline: Maria V. Altmann, Pursuer of Family Klimts, Dies at 94. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe